Secret Service would have helped Hillary wring Bubba's neck

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |WASHINGTON -- If the Secret Service agents guarding
President Clinton in 1998 had learned that Hillary Clinton "wanted to wring
Bill's neck" for cheating on her, as she says in her new book, what would
they have done?

A: Wrestled her to the ground and arrested her for plotting to
take the life of the president.

B: Looked the other way.

C: Helped her.
I am betting on C. I covered the Clinton White House during
1998, the "Year of Monica," and although it was often exhausting, it was
never dull.

Today, White House reporters are bored silly. There is tight
control over the news, and there have been no scandals.

But back in 1998, every day was Anything Can Happen Day.

The president of the United States was down in the Map Room
giving 4 milliliters of blood from his right arm so it could be taken to the
FBI lab and matched against the evidence on the little blue dress?

Sure, why not? Just another day at the Clinton White House.

The Secret Service got dragged into the whole mess when agents
were subpoenaed by Special Counsel Kenneth Starr to testify as to whether
Clinton was ever alone with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and whether
the two were observed engaging in sexual acts.

Today, everybody knows the answer to both those questions ("yes"
and "hoo-hah!"), but back then Clinton was denying everything and the
Treasury Department, which oversees the Secret Service, fought the
subpoenas, claiming that agents couldn't do their job if they had to worry
about ratting out their boss.

"I deal with the Secret Service all the time," a top Clinton
aide told me. "They tell me what they need. They tell me what the president
can and can't do, and mostly I defer to them. But if I ever have to worry
about whether agents are going to be put under oath to repeat what they see
and hear, I am going to say, 'I don't give a (expletive) about security, I
don't want you in the room.'"

The Supreme Court was not impressed with this line of reasoning,
however, and upheld Starr's subpoenas.

Which reinforced Clinton's belief that he was being victimized.

Not long after he had been sworn in as president, he had opened
up a back door at the White House one evening and walked out onto the South
Lawn to play with Socks, the cat.

Three Secret Service agents immediately stepped out of the
shadows and created a security triangle around them.

"The White House is the crown jewel of the federal penal
system," Clinton grumped.

And the Clintons got off to a rocky start with the agents. The
Clintons were not only unused to the close presence of the agents, but they
also wanted to handpick them, fearing that after 12 years of Republicans in
the White House, the agents in place might not be loyal to them.

Soon after the Clintons moved in, there were leaks to the press,
allegedly by Secret Service agents, about fights between the couple,
including one in which Hillary reportedly threw a lamp or a vase at her
husband's head.

"Or a Bible or a Mercedes-Benz," she jokingly said in a
television interview later. "You know, there were many variations. It
particularly bothered me that the Secret Service was being used to try to
substantiate untrue stories."

But the Clintons knew a thing or two about leaks. And the White
House soon kicked off rumors that the Treasury Department was shopping
around for another agency to guard the president and his family.

After that, all the leaks stopped and Clinton went out of his
way to woo the agents, meet their families and give them gifts when they
retired. He came to trust them. Which at least one canny politician told him
was a mistake.

"I was with him at a Bears game," Chicago Mayor Richard Daley
told me, "and he was surrounded by Secret Service agents. He asks me a
private question ... and I say: 'Mr. President, I can't answer you. Why?
Those two guys sitting here (the agents), I don't know them. A week from
now, if what I say shows up in gossip columns, I've got to blame them. So
I'm not talking.' And you know what? After, one of them comes up to me and
says: 'Thank you.'"